Despite a number of novels and films based on her allegedly bloody life, Elizabeth Bathory has never grabbed the popular imagination, perhaps because - unlike her fictional male counterpart, Count Dracula - she was a little too real for comfort. In this mesmerising book Tony Thorne attempts to get at the truth about the 16th-century Hungarian noblewoman who was said to bathed in the blood of some 200 virgins, many of whose mutilated bodies were buried in the grounds of her various castles. Was she a demented lesbian serial killer, or the innocent victim of a fanatical, religiously-motivated plot against her powerful family? Given the turbulence of Hungarian history in the intervening centuries, and the resultant scattering of relevant archive material, there isn't really enough hard evidence to make a confident judgment either way, but Thorne unearths such a wealth of fascinating detail that if his final portrait of "the Lady" remains blurred and shadowy, the image he creates of life in central Europe at the time, with all its splendours and brutalities, is startlingly vivid.
